Because printing presses can hold paper sheets that are much larger than those of consumer-grade printers, documents sent to commercial printers must be arranged in specific configurations called printer spreads. Knowing how to export to these spreads in Illustrator saves you the step of arranging your business's artwork pages in another application like Acrobat or InDesign. An easy way of arranging pages into a printer spread for PDF export is to position a document's artboards with Illustrator's Artboard panel.

Create a new Illustrator document with the New dialog box's Profile control set to "Print," and the Size control set to "Letter."

Click the grid-shaped Artboard tool icon from the Tools panel, and then press and hold "Alt," which specifies the mode for creating duplicate artboards.

Click on the artboard, and then drag right to create a second artboard, which represents the document's second page. Release the mouse, and then create a third artboard just as you created the second.

Press "T" to run the Type tool, and then click on the first artboard, whose label is "01." Type a "1" to indicate that this is the first page of your document. Use the Type tool to place a "2" on the artboard labeled "02," and to place a "3" on the artboard labeled "03." The document's current page configuration, 1, 2, 3, is how the final printed document will appear. For the commercial printer to produce this configuration, however, the pages have to be rearranged in a printer spread.

Click the "Window" menu's "Artboard" item to display the Artboard panel. This panel's top item, "Artboard 1," is the first to appear in the exported PDF. Rearranging the items in this panel rearranges the PDF's pages as well.

Click the Artboard panel's top item, and then click the panel's down arrow twice to move this artboard to the bottom. This action results in a printer spread of "2, 3, 1," even though Illustrator's canvas continues to display the artboards in the order "1, 2, 3."

Click the "File" menu's "Save As" command, and then click the "PDF" type from the Type control. Type a file name in the "File name" control, and then click "Save." Illustrator displays the Save Adobe PDF dialog box. Check the dialog box's "View PDF" check box to be able to view your PDF immediately after saving it.

Click "Save PDF" to close the dialog box. After pausing to create the PDF, Illustrator opens Adobe Reader.

Press your keyboard's "Page Down" key to view all pages of the PDF. The pages appear in the printer spread "2, 3, 1" that you specified with the Artboard panel's controls.

Warning

Information in this article applies to Illustrator CS6. It may vary slightly or significantly with other versions or products.

About the Author

Darrin Koltow wrote about computer software until graphics programs reawakened his lifelong passion of becoming a master designer and draftsman. He has now committed to acquiring the training for a position designing characters, creatures and environments for video games, movies and other entertainment media.